Mexican farmworkers strike as millions of dollars worth of crops rot

Farmers remove a fence during a protest at Los Pinos presidential house in Mexico City March 18, 2015. (Reuters / Edgard Garrido) / Reuters

More than 50,000 Mexican farmworkers are striking in Baja California, violently demonstrating against low pay, abuses and poor working conditions. As millions of dollars worth of crops rot in the fields, protest leaders are set to meet with growers.

Farmworkers are burning tires and throwing rocks in Baja, an
agricultural border state that supplies millions of dollars worth
of tomatoes, strawberries and other produce to the US. Hundreds
of protesters have blocked the Transpeninsular Highway, the main
north-south highway, on and off as the strike has spread across
the state, the Associated Press reported.

Demonstrators are demanding healthcare, overtime pay, days off,
water, breaks, an end to arbitrary firings and abuse ‒ especially
sexual abuse ‒ by field bosses, and for wages to be raised to
about $20 a day. Currently, most farmworkers earn $8-10 for a
full day of labor spent stooped over the crops in hot-house
farms.

"We all saw it as something normal for [farm owners] to
suspend people from work for three or four days, or fire them
without severance for demanding respect for our rights, for
demanding overtime or days off," Jose Ignacio Garcia, a
19-year-old who has worked the fields in Baja since he was 12,
told AP. "We got used to working more than 10 hours a day for 100
pesos ($7), but that doesn't even buy the minimum necessities you
need to live, to support a family." He is expecting his
first child in August.

Celina Sierra, 27, who has worked in the fields since she was 14,
supports her two children and her mother on her paycheck.

"We get up at 4 in the morning to wait for the truck to take
us to the fields," Sierra told AP. "We get to the fields
at 6:30 even though we're not supposed to start work till 7...
They never pay overtime, they tell us we have to finish a harvest
and work until four or five o'clock in the afternoon, bent over
and sometimes without water."

But the strike, which began last week, is threatening to destroy
thousands of jobs as crops rot in the fields.

"If the fields continue without a workforce, the harvests
will be lost and that will affect everyone who depends on this
part of the economy," Baja California Gov. Francisco Vega’s
office said in a statement.

Mexican police arrested more than 200 people after protests
devolved into riots, rock-throwing and vandalism last week, the
Los Angeles Times reported. Restaurant and shop owners in the San
Quintin and other Baja towns are boarding up their businesses as
more than 1,000 police and army soldiers have spread throughout
the state.

The strike comes a month after Mexico's agricultural sector
established an alliance of industry trade groups focused on
improving the lives of farmworkers, according to the LA Times.
But the group hasn’t yet addressed the underlying causes of the
unrest, and the lack of specific remedies proposed has raised
doubts among some human rights groups and labor unions.

"Right now [the alliance] is a public relations ploy,"
said Erik Nicholson, vice president of the United Farm Workers of
America, whose representatives are advising labor leaders in San
Quintin. "They failed the first round. We've seen or heard
nothing on them calling on their peers in Baja to comply with the
law."

On Wednesday, a coalition of farmworker groups are set to begin
direct negotiations with the Agricultural Council of Baja
California, which represents the Baja growers in the labor
dispute and in the national alliance.

Economist Alejandro Diaz Bautista told AP that the area lacks
elemental services: water, jobs, hospitals, cultural and school
facilities. Many farmworkers are from indigenous communities and
speak limited Spanish.

"The economic and social problems in San Quintin have to do
with social inequality," Diaz Bautista said.

In the region about 200 miles south of San Diego, 64 percent of
the population lacks adequate housing and access to water, power
and sanitation; 47 percent lack healthcare services, and 59
percent of children between 15 and 17 are not in school,
according to Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and
Geography. Many are functionally illiterate.